Music Is Duty-Free: Sending Sounds across Borders

The exchange of music or information about a musical work can be accomplished by electronic mail on different levels: (1) Any score generated by a computer program, read in by a scanner or digitized in some other way can be sent to musicians via electronic mail. (2) Sounds can be sampled, encoded and transferred. (3) Structural information about a musical piece can be exchanged among musicians using computer networks. (4) Live music can be performed in real time at different locations. In this paper a brief survey of projects that exploit these possibilities follows certain theoretical considerations.